Modern cities offer insight into how Ancient settlements developed
Feb. 12, 2014
Scott Ortman
The old French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the
same…” could apply to cities – modern or ancient. That’s because a new study
led by Scott Ortman, assistant professor of anthropology at CU-Boulder, found
that development patterns in modern urban areas are similar to ancient cities
settled thousands of years ago.
CUT 1 “Many people think that modern cities are something unique and that are
a radically new kind of human organization. (:10) What our studies suggest is
that it might be better to view modern cities as lying on a continuum with human
settlements throughout the course of our history in all context across time and
space.” (:21)
Ortman’s colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute have developed
mathematical models that describe how modern cities change as their
populations grow. For example, scientists know that as a population increases,
its settlement area becomes denser, while infrastructure needs per capita
decrease and economic production per capita rises.
CUT 2 “Patterns from contemporary cities show that as the population of a city
doubles the productivity of the group goes up 115 percent but the energy needs
of the group only go up 85 percent. So the modern data suggests that there is a
strong economy scale in contemporary cities. (:22) The question is whether those
same kinds of economies were there in the past or whether there is something
specific to modern cities that generates that.” (:30)
To answer that question, Ortman used data that had been collected in the
1960s from about 1,500 settlements in central Mexico that spanned from 1,150
years B.C. through the Aztec period, which ended about 500 years ago. The data
included the number of dwellings identified, the total settled area and the density
of potsherds scattered on the surface. Taken together, these artifacts give an
indication of the total population numbers and settlement density of the ancient
sites.
CUT 3 “What we found in our work is that it appears that the economies of scale
that emerge in modern cities emerge from the same processes that lead to the same
economy in ancient societies, too.” (:10)
Ortman says the findings of the new study may also be useful to
studies of modern societies. Because ancient settlements were typically less
complex than today’s cities, they offer a simple “model system” for testing the
equations devised to explain modern cities.
CUT 4 “In many other fields of science great insights come from working with
relatively simple examples of a phenomenon and to the extent that ancient cities
were smaller and simpler than modern ones there is a sense in which they provide
an especially clear way of testing our emerging ideas about what makes modern
cities work. (:20) So the idea that archaeological studies might help us design better
cities for our future is a striking thought and one that I find pretty exciting.” (:30)
-CUThe study is available at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0087902.
Contact:
Scott Ortman, 303-492-6064
Scott.Ortman@colorado.edu
Laura Snider, CU media relations, 303-735-0528
Laura.Snider@colorado.edu